A wind farm typically consists of a group of interconnected wind turbines disposed at a given farm site. The wind farm may include a group of two wind turbines or a group of hundreds of wind turbines, with the turbines being spread out over a small area (e.g., several hundred square meters) or over an extended area (e.g., hundreds of square kilometers). As is generally understood, the farm site typically corresponds to a location or area that provides the desired amount of wind exposure, which may be an offshore location or an onshore location.
The wind turbines within a wind farm are typically monitored and controlled using a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system that is housed within a control station located at the wind farm site. For example, the turbine controller housed within each wind turbine may be communicatively coupled to one or more computing devices located within the on-site control station. The control station computing device(s) may then implement the SCADA system by collecting operating data from the turbine controllers and transmitting control signals to the turbine controllers for controlling the operation of their corresponding wind turbines.
When a turbine fault occurs that requires a turbine reset with respect to one or more wind turbines within a wind farm, current control systems require that an operator connect to the on-site SCADA system and manually reset each impacted turbine. Unfortunately, this process is often quite slow, thereby unnecessarily increasing the downtime associated with the faulted wind turbine(s). Moreover, the problems associated with turbine downtime become even more of an issue when an operator is responsible for the operation of multiple wind farms located at a plurality of different locations, given that the operator is required to connect to the local SCADA system associated with each wind farm individually in order to manually reset the faulted wind turbine(s) within each farm. Such separate and individualized control significantly decreases the operator's response time to turbine faults occurring over multiple wind farms.
Accordingly, an improved system and method that allows for wind turbines located within one or more wind farms to be effectively and efficiently reset from a location remote to the wind farm(s) would be welcomed in the technology.